Voice-to-text

Voice-to-text lets you dictate into almost any text field in Bitment, not just AI chat composers, on a computer. Focus a field, start talking, and your words land where you were typing, whether that's a client note, an email body, a task description, or a search box.

It's built for the way you actually work: a dictation session keeps running even if you switch to another app or window mid-sentence, so you don't have to sit still and stare at the field while you talk.

Where to find it

Settings › Voice-to-Text holds the on/off switch and the rest of the dictation settings. The quick path is the gear on the mic's own hover pill, wherever you're dictating; both open the same settings.

Voice-to-text is desktop-only. On a phone or tablet, use your device's own keyboard dictation instead.

Key concepts

The mic dot: a small microphone that fades in just above your cursor whenever you're in a text field, once the cursor has been still for a moment.
A session: one continuous stretch of dictation, bound to the field you started it in rather than to whatever has focus at any given moment.
Committed vs. in-flight text: words Bitment is confident in are inserted immediately; the tail of what you just said previews in the mic's pill and can still self-correct before it lands.

Turn it on or off

Open Settings › Voice-to-Text.
Use the switch at the top to turn dictation on or off.

Off means no mic dot in any text field, no keyboard shortcut, and no mic button on any AI composer anywhere in the app, not just a hidden affordance. Turn it off if you never dictate and would rather the cursor stayed plain.

Start dictating

You have two ways to start:

Click the mic dot. Hover it first to see a pill naming the action and the keyboard shortcut, then click to start.
Press ⇧⌥V (Shift-Option-V) anywhere in an eligible text field.

⇧⌥V has two modes, told apart by how you release it:

Tap it (press and release quickly) to toggle: press once to start, press again to stop.
Press and hold it to push-to-talk: keep the chord held while you speak, and releasing it stops that session.

While you're dictating, the pill by your cursor shows a live loudness meter, a Stop control, and a running caption of what's being heard. Stopping drains for a moment so the last few words you said aren't cut off.

Only one dictation session runs at a time, app-wide. Starting a new one anywhere gracefully stops whichever session was already running.

Pick a microphone and a transcription credential

Open the gear on the mic's hover pill, or go straight to Settings › Voice-to-Text:

Microphone: which input device is captured. The same choice is used when you record a meeting.
Transcription credential: when more than one of your firm's credentials can transcribe, which one authorizes and pays for the session. This card only appears when you actually have a choice to make.

Voice-to-text is powered by Amazon Transcribe and billed through the same AWS Bedrock credential your firm uses for AI models, per minute of audio. See AI providers for how those credentials get set up.

Dictating while you look at something else

A dictation session belongs to the field you started it in, not to wherever your cursor happens to be right now. Keep talking while you open another app, click through a calendar, or read a different window, and your words keep landing in the field you started in.

While that's happening, the mic moves to a small floating pill at the bottom-left of the screen that names the field you're dictating into, with a Stop button, so you always know it's still listening.

Rich text fields, like notes and email bodies, are the one exception: they can only accept dictated text while they're actually focused. Anything you say while you're away from that field is held, the pill shows how much is waiting, and it drops in the moment you click back into the field.

A session ends when you stop it, or if the field itself goes away, for example if you close or minimize the window it was in. If that happens, a toast tells you the session ended and why, since the floating pill can't stick around for a field that no longer exists.

A single session stops itself after 90 minutes, since transcription bills per minute of audio and this keeps a microphone left on by accident from running (and charging) all day. Just start it again to keep going.

Per-device settings

Whether dictation is on at all, which microphone it captures, and which credential is billed are all saved to the browser or device you're using right now, not to your account. Set them up again on a new computer if you want the same behavior there.

Tips

If the mic seems to be capturing silence, Bitment warns you after a few seconds rather than letting a dead session sit there looking like it's working.
The mic dot recolors your cursor while it's active, so it's easy to tell at a glance whether you're in a live session.
Use hold-to-talk for a short burst of dictation and tap-to-toggle for a longer one where you don't want to keep a key held down.